This blog is by a long-time Oracle storage professional who has history with both NetApp and EMC.

June 21, 2007

I am an unrepentant NetApp-to-EMC Defector

In late 2005, I made an interesting move. I left Network Appliance and went to work for EMC.

You have to understand that for eight years at NetApp I was responsible for much of the pioneering and evangelism of the concept of storing Oracle data on NAS. I was the original NetApp Oracle Technical Marketing Engineer way back in 1997. I collaborated with Oracle on what became the OSCP program, and was the first person to file a NAS solution on that program. That was in 1998. Later, I was directly involved in penetrating Oracle Corporation as a customer of NetApp arrays which were used for Oracle database storage over NFS mounts. At the time, all of this was very controversial. Now, it seems mainstream. I guess I can take some of the credit for the acceptance of the concept of NAS for Oracle storage. I did not accomplish all by myself, certainly, but I had a big part in this process.

You get the idea. At NetApp, I was Mr. Oracle for a long, long time. I was partially responsible for much of the early technical work in what has become a huge part of NetApp's business.

So why did I leave NetApp and go to work for EMC?

I will explore this in future blogs. If you are interested in these details, please respond to this blog.

Hi,
It's interesting to know that you've been there and done the things that I'm currently involved in. Btw, how do you find EMC? I've heared that it's more bureaucratic - if i may say so. You must be missing the "startup" / "the best place to work " env that many speak of about the work culture in your previous company.

I'm wondering if you'd care to comment on how someone could have the impact you claim to have had without ever submitting a change to perforce?

-bob

Bob:

Try it a different way. Go to www.netapp.com. Click on technical library. Do a search for "browning".

I just performed this operation, and it returned 7 TRs which still bear my name, at least in the keyword index. I wrote the technical reports that you see there, all relating to Oracle on NetApp storage. My name has been excised from the reports, but the search engine has not had my name deleted from the keyword index yet.

My resume has over 30 TRs that I was either the primary author or co-author of, during my career at NetApp. Most of these have been replaced, so that my name no longer appears.

I suggest you perform this procedure quickly, though. As soon as the NetApp folks read my response to your post, I suspect that they will fix this rather quickly. Folks at NetApp are being called into legal if I even send them email. I am not a popular guy around there anymore.

I do not really need to justify my statement though. You can easily validate it yourself. Go find some of the old timers at NetApp. Many of them are still there. Ask them. They will tell you what I did.

In terms of perforce, I did not interact with that system very much. My involvement was in the field selling and evangelizing the solution, as well as writing white papers for the technical library. I did not report or fix bugs or such things. As I recall, that is what perforce is for. In other words, I worked in the areas of Technical Marketing and later Sales. My involvement in Engineering was basically nil. I did write some of the requirements for what became SnapManager for Oracle, and I also wrote the prototype of this solution, commonly referred to as SMAN. That did not require any interactions with perforce, though.

Interesting that you were involved with SnapManager for Oracle. This pretty cool widget drowns out a lot of the [good] technical arguments around block-based vs WAFL that you've explained and diagrammed here. In the mid-sized enterprise the dba's are often making the storage decisions. I don't understand why the SAN vendors aren't coming up with tools like this - they don't require custom NetApp functionality, just the standard snapshot/volume copy everyone does in some fashion or other.
Enjoy your posts - pretty light on the Kool-Aid and religion, which is a nice rarity in this trade!

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Al:

Thanks very much for your kind comments. I have been very distracted by the completion of our 11g solution and the run up to Oracle Open World in a couple of weeks, but I promise to get back to blogging again soon.

In terms of tools similar to SnapManager for Oracle, EMC has been publishing a tool called Replication Manager for significantly longer than NetApp has been publishing SMO. I have discovered that RM is a very well kept secret. It is very SAN centric. (At least it has been so far. I am trying to change that!) Also, it is well known among the SQL Server and Exchange crowd but less known among the Oracle community. Again, I am trying to change that. Look for a set of solutions coming out from my group which includes RM for snapshots, cloning, backup and recovery, and the like, in the next quarter or so.

disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. I am a blogger who works at EMC, not an EMC blogger. This is my blog, and not EMC's. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by EMC and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of EMC.